Publication on Winter Golden Eagle Habitat

TRC’s research team is excited to announce our latest publication, Predicting the spatial distribution of golden eagles to inform full annual cycle conservation in western North America. This open-access research article describes how TRC researchers and partners used millions of GPS locations from tagged eagles to map the best winter and non-breeding habitats for eagles across Wyoming and Montana. This publication describes the methods and models that underpin the new RaptorMapper decision support tool, also recently released by this team. Notably, the most important non-breeding habitats rarely overlap with the best breeding habitat, highlighting the need for conservation to incorporate year-round habitat needs for at-risk species, like Golden Eagles. Key partners in this effort have been lead author, Zach Wallace from Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Jeff Dunk and Brian Woodbridge from Cal Poly Humboldt, and Dave LaPlante from Natural Resource Geospatial. The effort would also not have been possible without the collaboration from MANY data contributors and others associated with those individual studies.